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For better visibility and brand awareness of a company on search engines, hiring the right online marketing company is crucial. With the right SEO service provider, a brand’s reach expands in leaps and bounds. And if it’s the other way round, it breaks a company’s online presence and cripples its existing search traffic. Considering the wide variety of SEO agencies to choose from with their wide range of specific and targeted marketing specializations, it’s really important that you search well and partner with the right company that can address your online marketing needs. It gets perplexing for many companies while taking a decision on selecting the right online marketing partner. Apart from conducting a thorough research, there are a few surefire ways that can help you reduce the risk of hiring an incompatible marketing partner company that fails to meet your expectation. Let’s take a look at the points that one should keep in mind while searching for SEO services in California and avoid agency hopping every couple of months:

Know your marketing goals before starting the search for a marketing partner. Spend time to understand what you want to achieve through the search engine optimization campaign. And discuss your goals with the service provider. This will help you set your own targets as well as give clear instructions to your SEO service provider. Decide on your prime focus area – Content marketing, online sales, big data, local search, mobile visitors, social media marketing or running a branding campaign. Whichever is your requisite, be specific. Agencies willing to take on companies without any clear goals will often offer you a dated and flat program that may not be optimized to give you desired outcome.

Search online marketing companies in California that have a transparent and open communication system with team members for a better business relationship. Communication should be in the form of regular updates, progress reports, weekly calls and monthly reports. On this pretext few questions that may be relevant are:

Share the actual activities and steps taken to optimize your business online.

Explain why a certain activity is done – in case you need clarity on any of their deliverables.

Ensure that you’re getting the true report, not a dressed up version of your progress. It is reasonable to compare figures from webmaster and Analytics to substantiate results.

How reliable are the KPI’s?

What is the time frame to expect noticeable results?

How will they improve the search ranking for your company?

Choose SEO Companies that have a proven track record from real clients with positive feedback and reviews. Bear in mind that companies these days hire people to write reviews and viewpoints, buyers are always encouraged to contact past clients directly to get a closer and real look into the matter with true highlight over the quality of services.

Go for word of mouth referrals. By word of mouth referral, we mean from a credible source. It saves your time; the referee establishes their credibility as a key resource and provides additional visibility of the agency. Of course any recommended company should not be hired until and unless it meets your company objectives, values and requirement criterion.

Keep in mind, biggest agencies with flashy clientele do not always provide the best services. Majority of the pressure is distributed amongst junior marketers. You’ll get to exploit their senior expertise provided you are a top paying client.

Take quotes from two to three agencies before you finalize your seo service provider. Study and compare the detailed quotes to understand who pays more attention to the needs of the clients. Also you get a fair idea on agencies willing to take up as many services as possible with limited resource.

Take the current and past client list. Vanessa Fox, author of ‘Marketing in the age of Google’ says that a reputable SEO firm should be transparent enough to share their brief list of current and existing clientele. You may gauge the authenticity and effectiveness of a candidature with these references and verify with them that they found any positive improvement in search ranking or not.

The online marketing agency you pick out should be able to answer:

What is the cost estimate of a lead from different traffic channels?

Which landing pages have the highest rate conversion?

Which sources of traffic are generating low conversion cost?

Which metrics are completely useless?

So finalize an agency that actually knows how to measure the overall success of a campaign, ROI and has the correct understanding of numbers.

Know if the agency has the right technology stack or not. Tech stacks are layers in software that provides wide functionality to the user. The must ask question on this ground are:

Are they comfortable on WordPress or other technical CMS’s like Joomla, Drupal or PHP?

Are they adept in migrating a website, if needed?

Do they have the appropriate API?

Remember a right vendor always has the knowledge to tell you how SEO is going to shape up in the coming 6 months from now. This change will impact the relationship as right partner should always have the right foresight.

Know their communication pattern as each agency varies in their style and service. Know when they’ll be available over phone, Skype, email or text.

Try to associate with agencies that are exceptional in their internet marketing skills by being ethical in their dealings. These people won’t be doing your work at lowest price tags for sure! So avoid cheapest options and focus on companies who have specialized on a particular service with strong competitive edge. These specialized agencies have a thorough understanding of the industry, pre-established relationships and large quantities of industry information on what’s working and what’s not. Exploit this knowledge to your favor!

Your agency should be adept in boosting your local search. It’s especially important for small scale businesses and start ups trying to attract local customers!

Know what happens if you decide to break the contract mid way for whatever reasons. Look for fees for unexpected termination in the contract and change them if you need to.

A good online marketing company will send regular reports on monthly basis on various changes and alterations of your website with emphasis on their activities and results as well. It should have report on search traffic, different campaigns, link building, search rankings and conversion. Make sure your developer and the SEO Vendor are on the same plane and follow an open line of communication. Always look for a detailed log of any minutest changes in your website.

Make sure the company adheres to Google’s guidelines and best practices! For long term traffic and visibility, stay away from penalty!

Take a detailed account of payment structure and budget accordingly. It could be project wise, SEO retainer or hourly payments. Also take a note on interest fees in case of late payments.

We know that SEO is a long-term investment. The tips discussed above can easily help you to weed out shady SEO firms and freelancers. One last pointer, shoot as many questions as possible to find the most trustworthy SEO help! Think you need help? Browse the site to look for the best SEOservices in CA.